The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Reputation: A Study on Top 100 Companies Operating in India

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance is judged against the disclosure made by the companies in their Sustainability Reports or Business Responsibility Reports. CSR theoretically as argued in the literature enhances company credibility and in turn, influences the perception of the stakeholders in improving Corporate Reputation (CR). This article examines this claim by empirically investigating the top 100 companies’ CSR disclosure and their reputational score. The analysis renders a finding which is contradictory to the common belief that CSR significantly impacts reputation building.

Rhetorical Agendas

All senators are adapting their communications to a new media climate where they make strategic choices about how to differentiate themselves through their rhetorical agenda—a public-facing presentation of a senator’s priorities for representation. This chapter lays out a theory of senators’ rhetorical agendas and constituent-driven communication on Twitter. Senators are utilizing Twitter’s unconstrained platform for low-cost reputation building with the public. Each senator is incentivized to strategically communicate a rhetorical agenda that fosters constituency relationships, building trust and legitimacy with voters. Senators make these connections on Twitter via a two-step approach, directly engaging people online but also by building digital relationships with journalists and political influencers who indirectly translate a senator’s priorities for the public. Senators get to decide how they frame their agenda and what type of constituency they want to cultivate with their strategic messaging.

Tweeting is Leading

Social media is changing the business of representation and lawmaker reputation building, and this book uses the US Senate to illustrate the constituent-driven nature of political communication. I offer a critical analysis of senators’ communication on Twitter, the forces that shape it, and the agendas that result. Senators strategically communicate a political image that reflects their unique political persona. They have to decide what they want to be known for, crafting communications that prioritize legislation, constituent service, and party politics in ways that meet the interests of their constituencies and foster promising electoral returns. Senators’ communicated, public priorities—what is termed in this book as the rhetorical agenda—offer a necessary tool for understanding how senators link their carefully crafted public image with potential voters. The rhetorical agenda uses more than 180,000 lawmaker tweets to challenge what we know about representation, removing the institutional and political constraints on congressional communication and giving lawmakers a messaging platform where individual discretion is high, the relative costs are low, and someone is always watching.

Evolution of deterrence with costly reputation information

Deterrence, a defender’s avoidance of a challenger’s attack based on the threat of retaliation, is a basic ingredient of social cooperation in several animal species and is ubiquitous in human societies. Deterrence theory has recognized that deterrence can only be based on credible threats, but retaliating being costly for the defender rules this out in one-shot interactions. If interactions are repeated and observable, reputation building has been suggested as a way to sustain credibility and enable the evolution of deterrence. But this explanation ignores both the source and the costs of obtaining information on reputation. Even for small information costs successful deterrence is never evolutionarily stable. Here we use game-theoretic modelling and agent-based simulations to resolve this puzzle and to clarify under which conditions deterrence can nevertheless evolve and when it is bound to fail. Paradoxically, rich information on defenders’ past actions leads to a breakdown of deterrence, while with only minimal information deterrence can be highly successful. We argue that reputation-based deterrence sheds light on phenomena such as costly punishment and fairness, and might serve as a possible explanation for the evolution of informal property rights.

We collaborate with everyone, but with some more than others: evidence of stakeholder collaboration among internal security professional higher education institutions

The aim of this article is to identify the main stakeholders of institutions of professional higher education in the field of internal security in selected countries, and the most important collaboration practices, and the factors that affect collaboration. Within the framework of a qualitative phenomenographic study, interviews were conducted with representatives of Estonian, German, Finnish, and Norwegian institutions of professional education in the field of internal security. The results showed that institutions of professional higher education differ from traditional universities in prioritizing their main stakeholders, putting employers first, and not students. In addition, the ministries under whose government they operate, and other higher education institutions were named as the main stakeholders. Collaboration with stakeholders is mostly based on common interests and personal relationships (e.g., mediation, networking, joint reputation building, collaboration councils), on some kind of formal basis (e.g., feedback system, collaboration councils) or subordination (e.g., execution of orders and instructions, trading). The aspects most influencing collaboration were considered to be the aspects related to trust and professionalism, and in particular informal collaboration was valued. The results of this study enabled the author to supplement a framework from a previous study, which originally described the theoretical collaboration of the stakeholders of an institution of higher education in the field of internal security; this was supplemented by adding the dimension of collaboration diversity.